The Mice and the Elephants

Also known as Chuhe aur Haathi

• 3 minute read
• Ages 6-10
• Panchatantra Stories

An earthquake destroyed a town, and the people left it, and after some years there was nothing there but broken walls and grass growing through the floors.

A very large community of mice moved in and made it their own.

Then a herd of elephants, travelling to a lake in a dry season, found a shortcut through the ruins and began using it twice a day.

Hundreds of elephants. Straight across the mouse town.

The request

The mouse king went out to meet the elephant king, which took some courage, and put his case plainly.

"We live under this ground. Every time you cross it, a great many of us die, and you do not know you have done it. There is another way round to the lake. It is longer by half an hour. I am asking you to take it."

The elephant king listened to the whole of it.

Then he said that half an hour was not a great deal, and that he had not known, and that they would go round.

And the herd went round from that day, every day, without exception.

The mouse king thanked him and said that if his people could ever be of use, the elephants had only to send word.

The elephant king was polite about this, and did not laugh, though it was clearly a strange thing to hear from a mouse.

The trap

Some months later a king in that country wanted elephants for his army, and his men dug a pit trap on the road to the lake and covered it, and the herd walked into it.

They took most of them. The elephants were roped and tied to trees at the edge of the forest, and left there overnight to be collected in the morning.

The elephant king had been at the back and was not caught. He stood in the trees and could do nothing at all.

Then he remembered.

He sent the youngest elephant, who was small enough to move quietly, to the ruined town with a message.

That night

The mice came out in the dark. Not a few. The whole community, thousands of them, moving across the open ground in a mass.

They went up the ropes and over the knots and into the trees, and they chewed. Every rope on every elephant, at the same time, all night.

By dawn the ropes were on the ground in pieces and the trees were empty, and when the king's men came in the morning there was nothing there at all except a great deal of chewed rope and a great many small footprints.